TLDR: A student posted my lab assignment as a “project” on Hackster.io and Instructables. His posts hide its origin as a lab assignment, in which a lot of the materials (texts, circuit diagram and similar) were given to the students. If you were a potential employer reading his posts,
- you would not know it was a lab assignment,
- you would think (falsely) that the author of the posts designed and implemented a major project that involved a significant amount of original work,
- you would think (falsely) that the author of the posts has a very good understanding of the subject matter and a very good ability to communicate his work in writing.
Should I say something to the student (who is not my student anymore)? If so, what? Should I take any further actions?
As an educator, I feel like it is my responsibility to help my students understand when they are misrepresenting their work, and/or failing to meet professional/academic standards and legal requirements with respect to attribution and copyright. I am not sure how to communicate this lesson without placing the student on the defensive.
A student posted my lab assignment as a “project” on Hackster.io and Instructables
Last semester, I taught a graduate-level embedded systems course, for which I developed some new lab materials.
One lab assignment in particular was meant to make sure that all students gained some experience with putting together a project composed of multiple parts. For this lab exercise, I gave students a pre-constructed circuit on a breadboard, and a code base including functions for using each of the parts on this circuit. The students only had to implement the control flow of the program, using the functions I gave them.
I just noticed that one of my students has posted this lab assignment as a "project" on Hackster.io and Instructables. His post is a near-verbatim copy of the written material I gave to students, including:
A description of the hypothetical scenario I presented to motivate the lab:
You have just been hired at a company that does X. You have been tasked with...
He just changed it to read:
We have just been hired...
A lot of background reading material which I and my TAs wrote, including original graphics, explaining how each of the parts used in the lab work.
- Fritzing diagram of the circuit (which I constructed).
- Tutorial-style instructions for the tasks involved.
In total, the student posted ≈2250 words of written material, and some images, all taken from my lab instructions.
The student made minor changes to hide its origin as a class assignment
The changes he made were:
Some changes to the text that appear to be mainly for the purpose of hiding the origin of the project. For example, where I wrote:
This lab
He changed it to:
This project
He omitted the parts where I instructed students to write a unit test for each subsystem, instructions on what was provided already and what new code students were expected to write and submit, and how they were going to be graded.
- He added his own “main” source file, i.e. the thing he had to submit to me.
I hold the copyright to the materials he posted
All of my lab materials for the course, including those written materials, are in a public repository on Bitbucket.
Students were supposed to “fork” the repository in order to complete the lab, and were required to keep their fork private for the duration of the course. I didn't give any additional instructions regarding posting lab materials online.
The code in the repository is under an open source license that allows students to redistribute the code. (He didn’t actually post any of my code, though.)
The text material and graphics, which he did post, are not; I have not licensed those under any copyright licenses (like Creative Commons) that enable redistribution.
My university/school/department has no formal policy on posting coursework online. I didn’t say anything specific in the syllabus or give any other explicit instructions (besides for what I just noted above) about students posting course materials online.
The source (my repository of lab materials) is not indexed by Google, so the student’s posts appear to be original material
Although my lab repository containing the material is public, Google doesn’t index its contents. So if you Google some of the text in these posts, it appears to be original.
The only attribution is that the student mentioned me as having “inspired” the project
On Hackster.io, there is an “Additional Contributors” field, in which he wrote:
Designing the lab that inspired this project by ff524
Question: How should I address this?
Should I say something to the student (who is not my student anymore)? If so, what? Should I take any further actions?